Monday, January 14, 2008

Alex de la Iglesia Goes to Oxford

The film’s premiere is on Friday in all Spanish cinemas, and it is based on the Argentinean Guillermo Martínez’s novel to form a plot involving Mathematics codes.

The Basque film maker, Alex de la Iglesia, moves from his particular way of understanding cinema to the strict academic atmosphere of Great Britain and gets involved for the first time in an international project with Oxford Crimes (Los Crímenes de Oxford), a classical mystery movie that has Elijah Wood and John Hurt as protagonists.

Although he admits having instilled “a bit of tragedy into comedy” in his filmography, Alex de la Iglesia concentrates in mystery and drama on his new film, Oxford Crimes, a “daring and complicate” project entirely filmed in English.

The film’s premiere is on Friday, in all Spanish cinemas and it is based on the Argentinean Guillermo Martínez’s novel to form a plot involving Mathematics codes and clear references to mystery cinema, with the Spanish actress Leonor Watling in a secundary role.

Inspired in Hitchcock

De la Iglesia recognizes being between the two points of his characters, as “the distrustful one who keeps certain hope”, and having been inspired more than ever in Alfred Hitchcock to tell this story.

In Oxford Crimes, Martin, a Maths student -Elijah Wood- and Seldom, a logic teacher -John Hurt- form an unexpected alliance to find out the responsible of the crimes.